Alamo, Bowl-game Organizers Ok Truce

This Battle of the Alamo may be lasting longer than the first one, but it probably will be forgotten a lot sooner.

Both sides in a five-month dispute between Fort Lauderdale-based Alamo Rent A Car and a Texas group proposing a new college football bowl game say an end to their conflict appears near.

A tentative agreement between attorneys for the Alamo Bowl and Alamo Rent A Car was reached this week, both sides say.

Under the agreement, bowl organizers promised not to move their game from San Antonio, or to change its name if they do. A lawsuit filed in San Antonio against Alamo Rent A Car by bowl organizers would be dropped.

In return, Alamo Rent A Car would agree that the proposed Dec. 31 bowl game could be televised and promoted nationally.

At issue are legal rights to the Alamo name.

When sports organizers in San Antonio got the idea of joining the hoopla over college football, one name came to mind: the Alamo Bowl.

After all, they reasoned, the game will be played in the city`s new stadium, the Alamodome, which is a half-mile from the chapel that made the word Alamo famous.

``There are four pages of companies named Alamo in the Yellow Pages here,`` said Ted D. Lee, a local attorney representing the San Antonio Bowl Association.

In February, Alamo Rent A Car told the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Washington that it would oppose the San Antonio group`s application for legal rights to the Alamo Bowl name.

With 123 locations in 38 states, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, the privately held rental-car corporation was concerned that confusion over the bowl`s name could result if the Alamo Bowl were to leave San Antonio.

``The only problem we had was we already had the name Alamo trademarked nationally and internationally,`` company spokeswoman Kathy Bradley said on Friday.

There are precedents to bowl games switching locations. The Liberty Bowl, named after the historically significant bell in Philadelphia, left that city in 1963. It settled in Memphis, Tenn., in 1965.

The 2-year-old Heritage Bowl, of which Alamo Rent A Car is a major sponsor, moved from north Dade County`s Joe Robbie Stadium last year to the campus of Florida A&M University in Tallahassee.

Once the necessary legal papers are filed, this Alamo fight will be over.

But the tentative agreement comes too late for some Texans.

Lee said some resent the involvement of a South Florida rental car company that was founded 138 years after a 13-day siege ended in a massacre, at a site that is now downtown San Antonio.

All the city wanted was to be home to a second-tier bowl game similar in prestige to the Gator Bowl, Lee said.

Even Alamo Rent A Car admits there are hard feelings.

``Citizens were outraged, thinking we filed suit against them, which actually never happened,`` said Bradley. ``Some San Antonioans felt their local, national monument had been spit upon.``